When language policy and pedagogy conflict

An international school in Greece has adopted, as its language policy, English as the ‘official’ medium of interaction. At the same time, the school has adopted ‘free interaction’ in designated play areas as its pedagogical approach. The aim of this approach is to promote learners’ autonomy. Thus, a conflicting situation has developed: Reception educators are expected to police the use of English in the kids’ play areas without however undermining children’s autonomy and/or disrupting their ‘free interaction’. This book examines how children and their educators deal in actual interaction with the conflicting situation that emerged as a result of the school’s policies. The study is based on a corpus of audio recordings of naturally occurring interactions collected in the school’s play areas. The analytic framework draws on Spolsky’s (2004) language policy framework (and on the notion of ‘practiced language policy’) and on Conversation Analytic methodologies applied to language choice. The key finding is that children and educators have developed and follow their own ‘practiced language policies’ as a response to the conflicting demands imposed on them by the school.